


One Foot In Front Of the Other

by SF_Side_Account



Category: Sally Face (Video Games)
Genre: Did anybody else grow up with the Casson books?, Gen, Heavily based on Indigo and Rose Casson, Larry's Sister Lives AU, Lonely kids who had to grow up too fast find each other, My policy in media is 'If there's no found family then WHAT is the point', Those were good sibling dynamics, and it shows in everything I write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:46:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29641836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SF_Side_Account/pseuds/SF_Side_Account
Summary: People sent baby gifts when Larry was born. This time, they only send flowers. Lisa politely accepts each new bouquet, and then personally throws them out as soon as the visitors leave the room.They name the baby Evelyn, and against all odds, she lives.(Really just three thousand words of 'Okay, but what if Larry had gotten to be an older brother after all?' because I feel like even when things got bad, he would have been less lonely.)
Kudos: 6





	One Foot In Front Of the Other

She’s born a month early and from her very first thin wail people are already warning Lisa and Jim not to get attached.

(She is not a healthy baby.)

(And she’s so very, very small.)

People sent baby gifts when Larry was born. This time, they only send flowers. Lisa politely accepts each new bouquet, and then personally throws them out as soon as the visitors leave the room.

They name the baby Evelyn, and against all odds, she lives.  
\--------

When she comes home, Larry’s not allowed to hold her by himself for a long time. He’s actually kind of okay with this. He’s always hovering by her crib and looking over Lisa’s shoulder for a better look at her, but she’s so fragile looking it kind of scares him. He has this feeling that if he tries to pick her up she’ll break into a million pieces.

He sneaks into his parents’ room at night and watches as she sleeps, tiny chest rising and falling, irrationally afraid that if he doesn’t check to make sure she’s still there he’ll wake up one morning and she won’t be.

“Get bigger,” he whispers staring at her little hands and wispy hair and face that has always seemed too delicate even for a baby, big haunting eyes serenely closed. “Get bigger, get bigger, get bigger.”

Little by little, she does.  
\--------

When she starts crawling, Evelyn is almost immediately shortened to Evie, because yelling for someone to get _Evie_ out of the garbage sounds slightly less weird than _Evelyn._ Larry shortens it further within the hour.

“Larry, stop calling your sister Evil!”

“She likes it, though!” Larry protests as Evil goes into peals of little kid laughter in his arms. “Don’t you, Evil?”

“LARRY!”

Larry is the only person in the world who is allowed to refer to Evie as Evil. Anyone else attempting to do so is immediately treated to several hours of high pitched toddler screaming. Larry would be more smug about this if he didn’t have to live in the same apartment with it.

Despite getting sick with alarming frequency, Evil proves to be a sturdy child. She survives through almost every childhood illness the doctors have ever heard of, and even a few they haven’t. Several of them begin petitioning to make her a case study. Jim goes a funny shade of gray when they suggest this and makes it very clear they are never to ask this of anyone in his family _ever again._

She's a very curious child, and gets into almost everything. Larry campaigns for a lock on his bedroom door for three weeks and finally gets it after she finds the Sanity’s Fall tickets that he and Jim have been holding onto for a month in preparation for the Halloween concert. Larry, staring down at the shredded, spit soaked tickets, loudly demands to know why he couldn’t have gotten a dog instead of a sister, and is only somewhat mollified when a few phone calls to a very understanding man at the venue gets them some replacements.

By the time she reaches Kindergarten, Evil is still noticeably smaller than most of her classmates. The teacher assures Lisa that she’ll keep a close eye on her and ensure her time in their class goes smoothly. She discovers before the day is even half over that she should be keeping an eye on Evie Johnson for entirely different reasons, and spends a frantic twenty minutes trying to put out the small fires Evil has been showing the children how to make using an oversized magnifying glass. (”My daddy showed me!”)

She’s a very bright child, but she tends to bring an inescapable wave of chaos with her wherever she goes. Her first three teachers all agree that ten months have never felt so long.

Though Larry’s a little closer to Jim, and Evil feels a slightly closer to Lisa, there is no point in time when either child feels unloved. Jim takes them fishing a lot. He’s prone to making long speeches about the beauty of nature when he does this, and usually doesn’t notice when Larry and Evil tune him out.  
\---------

When Evil is eight years old, her father disappears, her brother goes to jail, and her life falls apart.

Lisa goes through days like a sleepwalker, eating little and saying less and less until one terrifying day when she just stops talking completely. There are days when she won’t get out of bed, and sometimes Evil catches her staring out the window with an expression she doesn’t understand and scares her beyond reason. Larry, who’s been back from juvie for all of two weeks and hasn’t smiled once in that time, starts taking over and doing whatever their mother can’t. He makes meals, he packs Evil’s lunches, and he makes her swear that if anybody asks, no matter what, she is to tell them that _everything is fine at home._

Evil tells a lot of lies, these days.

Sometimes Evil catches Larry doing things she doesn’t understand, and when she asks why he tells her not to worry, that it’s nothing. She sees him hiding all the scissors, and he tells her it’s nothing. She catches him putting locks on all the windows, and he just shrugs. She finds him one day stuffing everything in the medicine cabinet into a duffel bag before taking it up to the tree house and when he comes back down and she demands to know what’s going on, there’s a split second where he looks up at their mother’s window before shaking his head and telling her not to worry about it.

She starts to put the pieces together after that.

On the days Lisa won’t get up, Larry doesn’t go to school. He thinks Evil doesn’t know about it, but she’s not stupid. He tells her leaves for school after she does, and she pretends she believes him and erases all the messages the school leaves on the answering machine about missed classes when he forgets to.

Eventually Abuelita comes to stay with them, and suddenly taking care of Lisa isn’t Larry’s job anymore. He hovers a lot as she works, like he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself now, then gradually starts spending more and more time alone in the treehouse.

Larry believes, firmly, fiercely believes, that their father did not leave them. Evil, who has lost any security she ever felt in less than three months and needs somebody to blame, does not.

The first time she introduces herself to someone as Evie Garcia, Larry’s face seems to close up.  
\-----------

When Sal moves into the building, Evil doesn’t think much about him until he starts regularly hanging out in their apartment with Larry. Then she’s unsure what to make of him. 

It’s been a very long time since she or Larry actually brought any friends back home, and even though Lisa’s been fine for years now and they no longer need to worry about some well meaning outsider seeing something they shouldn’t and saying exactly the wrong thing to their parents, it still puts her a little on edge. She’s used to taking cues from Larry about who gets to see what part of their lives, so if he’s cool with Sal being there she knows it SHOULD be fine- but it still feels strange. 

It goes against all of her instincts not to chase him out and some of that must show, because Sal always gives her a lot of space while managing to be unfailingly polite, as though he knows what she’s thinking and is trying not to give her any possible reason to do so.

(He’s also smart enough to realize right off the bat that just because Larry calls her Evil doesn’t mean he gets to, and that unkowingly wins him points.)

After months of tiptoeing around each other, things finally come to a head one night when Evil’s staying home alone.

She rarely has the apartment to herself. When Lisa can’t be there personally, she usually leaves them together and appoints Larry in charge- but Larry has a school project and will be camped out over at the Campbells’ house for the next several thousand years to work on it with Ash, so Evil gets away with no supervision for one night. She’d be enjoying it more if it weren’t for the faint feeling of nausea that’s been plaguing her all afternoon. She refrains mentioning it to Lisa, knowing full well that at the first hint of illness her mother will drop everything and insist on staying home to keep an eye on her, and tells herself the feeling will pass.

The feeling does not pass. 

It persists as she makes herself some mac and cheese for dinner, increases as she sits down to watch the Sailor Moon special, and has risen to a crescendo by the time gets around to doing the washing up, staring down at the dirty dishwater and breathing shakily through her nose. 

Everything feels hot. 

She can feel her clothes sticking to her with sweat, and notices from far away that her hands are trembling against her will. She is slowly beginning to realize that this might not be regular Evil’s-Always-Sick barfy-ness, and that something might be really wrong when someone knocks on the door.

After sitting through several years of Lisa’s lectures about never answering the door to strangers, Evil has no intention of acknowledging whoever’s out there, apartment or not. She’s still not particularly inclined to do it when a voice from outside announces that it’s Sal. 

She’s not at a hundred percent right now, and dealing with someone she’s still sort of wary of but needs to be polite to requires her to exercise social muscles that she barely uses at the best of times. She _really_ doesn’t want to do it while she’s compromised. But she knows full well that if Sal’s down here bothering her at this time of night, it’s because Lisa asked him to check on her, and it’ll look extremely suspicious if she refuses to talk to him. So, gritting her teeth, Evil carefully makes her way to the door, schools her expression into something she hopes is appropriately neutral as opposed to painfully ill, opens the door…

…and then proceeds to throw up all over Sal’s ratty old converse.

The next hour is a blur. When Evil thinks back to that night, her first clear memory past puking on Sal’s shoes is hacking up what feels like the majority of her internal organs into the toilet while he holds her hair back. She’s never entirely sure how she got there.

She’s also unclear as to how she ended up curled up on the couch some time later, under a blanket she’d insisted she didn’t need before she’d suddenly started shivering and staring down at the ancient blue mop bucket Larry dubbed The Sick Bucket back when they were little and still regularly got the stomach flu. She wonders idly how Sal even knew where it was.

“I’m okay now,” she mutters as Sal comes back into the room with a glass of water. “It’s… it’s over, I’m pretty sure. You can- I mean. Thank you. Really. A lot. But you can go home now.”

“It’s fine,” Sal says, shrugging as he hands her the water as though it really is no big deal. Evil scowls.

“You can go _home,”_ she repeats, clutching the glass with both hands and sipping gingerly. “It was nice of you to check on me, but you don’t-” 

Another wave of nausea hits unexpectedly and she chokes, slopping water everywhere. Sal’s there in an instant, snatching the glass away and grabbing her hair as she retches over The Sick Bucket. It’s just dry heaving because there’s really nothing left in her system to throw up, but it goes on for several minutes and it feels like death.

She hates EVERYTHING.

“You okay?” Sal asks when she finally stops, hand hovering by her shoulder like he’s got a vague sense that some sort of touch would be comforting here but no experience with it in practice. Everything he’s done for her tonight has been a little like that. Whenever he’s not in motion he seems completely out of his depth, and Evil, sure she’s least equally uncomfortable, keeps trying to give him an out so he can leave without feeling guilty but he won’t take it and she doesn’t understand why.

“Are you doing this to make Larry like you?” she asks instead, out of patience and abandoning politeness in favor of aggression.

“Do I need to make him like me?” Sal asks, sitting down by the bucket so she no longer has to crane her neck up to look at him. It’s not rhetorical, even though it should be. It was a ridiculous accusation, she knew that even as she said it, but for some reason he sounds like he genuinely wants her opinion.

“No,” she admits after a moment. “You’re his best friend.”

Sal makes a small humming sound to himself that she thinks means he’s pleased. Evil wonders, faintly incredulous, if he’d actually been unsure.

“Is it to make _me_ like you?” She eyes him suspiciously as she makes herself more comfortable on the couch with whatever dignity she can muster, given the situation. Still on the ground, Sal draws a knee up to his chest. Evil notices, with a twinge of guilt, that his feet are bare.

“I kind of got the vibe,” Sal says dryly. “That the only thing that would make you like me is you, personally, deciding to like me. So, no.”

He isn’t wrong.

“Is it so I’ll owe you?” She finally asks, because if he isn’t doing to be a suck up then that’s the only other motivation she can possibly think of for someone she’s spoken to maybe three times in almost a year and never once tried to befriend to go to all this trouble.

The look Sal gives her is so deeply unimpressed that Evil almost feels ashamed for asking. Even through the prosthetic, the disapproval in his eyes is tangible. He refrains from dignifying the question with a response, for which Evil is thankful.

“Why, then?” She mutters, pulling the blanket nearly to her nose, shoulders hunched inwards. “Why are you still here?”

“Because being sick by yourself sucks.” He says simply.

Evil stares at him.

It cannot be that simple. It cannot _possibly_ be that simple. 

Nobody would do all this just for the sake of ensuring a near stranger wouldn’t be _lonely,_ nobody does that, that doesn’t make any _sense-_

…but he’s here. It’s 11:30 at night, and she puked on him, and argued with him, and barely even knows him and he’s still here. Nobody does that, but he’s still here, because maybe, to him, it really IS that simple.

She watches him, uncomprehending as he fiddles with one of the Ranma ½ volumes she left lying around, and she doesn’t understand at all.

“…you’re so _weird,”_ she says a little helplessly. 

Sal laughs a little and doesn’t argue.

“…you have to read it backwards,” is the last thing she tells him, taking the manga from him and flipping it around before handing it back, and then with a wave of exhaustion, sleep overtakes her at last.  
\--------

The next time Evil sees Sal is a Monday evening. He and Larry are sitting at the kitchen table doing homework when she comes back from Jessica’s house. Sal looks up as she enters, making as if to wave before putting his hand down as though thinking better of it, while Larry continues working as if she isn’t there and eating what she’s fairly certain is the last pack of gushers.

It’s become a common sight since Sal moved into the building, so routine that Evil’s just come to expect to find them there whenever she gets home from school. Normally she just goes to her room to work until they’re done and Sal leaves, but today she pauses.

“I’m not sharing, so don’t even ask.” Larry tells her as she hovers, looking up at last as he pops another candy in his mouth. “Do you need something?”

“Besides more gushers and one less brother?” Evil retorts, more out of reflex than with any real heat. She watches them for a moment longer, fidgeting with the straps of her backpack, then pulls up a chair and joins them.

Larry raises his eyebrows as she sits down, busying herself with her own homework to avoid looking at either of them, but doesn’t say anything.

Sal just steals a gusher from Larry and passes it over to her.  
\---------

Sal is considered unofficial family by all three of them before the year is even over. As far as Larry and Evil are concerned, he becomes official family the first time Lisa yells at him along with them.

_“Do you even have a middle name?!”_ Lisa demands mid rant after full-naming Larry, Evil and attempting to do so with Sal before discovering three syllables alone do not properly convey just how much trouble he’s in.

“Uh…” Sal trails off faintly, having had no experience with parental reprimanding beyond Henry’s patented ‘Kid, what the _fuck?’_ until right this moment and still somewhat shell shocked.

“Eustace.” Evil suggests helpfully. 

_“Evie.”_ Sal says, aggrieved as Lisa decides that beggars can’t be choosers and begins yelling again. (”SAL EUSTACE FISHER-”) 

“If _we’re_ in trouble,” Larry tells Sal out of the side of his mouth, clapping him amicably on the back before Lisa rounds on him again. _“You’re_ in trouble. Welcome to the family.”  
\---------- 

“Esto es nuestro primo, Sal. Ser amable con él o te mataré.” 

“No se parece en nada a ti!" 

“Y no te ves nada como tu padre, pero todos somos amables y pretendemos no notar.” 

“I understood that last thing, and that was uncalled for.”  
\--------- 

It surprises Evil, a little, how well they work as a unit of three. The days when it was just Larry and her versus the rest of the world are long over. She misses it a little, sometimes, but the change no longer feels like loss- just different. She finds, as the three of them sit on the roof during the fourth of July to watch the fireworks and yell unflattering songs about Ronald Reagan until people start complaining, that she doesn’t object. 

“How come Larry gets a nickname and I don’t?” Evil grumbles one day, putting her chin on Sal’s shoulder to get a better look at what he’s doing. It’s a testament to how much time he’s spent with her and Larry- and probably Ash, too, now that she thinks about it- that he no longer flinches when somebody touches him unexpectedly. 

“Should I call you Evie-Face?” Sal asks, amused, pausing mid-problem. Evil considers, humming thoughtfully to herself. 

“Hm… no. That sounds kinda dumb-” 

“Excuse me.” 

“I mean it’s not dumb for you! It’s dumb for Larry, but that’s what makes it perfect for him-” 

Sal cracks up. Evil grins, snickering, even as he swats at her in an attempt to defend his best friend’s honor. 

“Nah. You can call me…” Evil pauses for a minute, chewing her lip, then makes her decision. 

“Call me Evil.” 

Sal blinks. 

He takes a moment to digest this, then turns, craning his neck around to try and look at her. “Are you sure?” 

“I’m sure.” Evil says. And she is. 


End file.
